A hereditary monarchy is good for politics

I suppose it was inevitable that with the death of HM the Queen certain floodgates would open. During her reign it often felt as though there were forces that she was single-handedly holding back. As Lionel Shriver has noted elsewhere, they have come in particularly malicious form from parts of the US. But there is one part of the republican critique of monarchy that has returned which is too little addressed, and which I have found myself countering in recent days.

Not, I might add, from the sort of people who are simply hostile to our country and its past, but rather from people who wish us well but are somewhat baffled by the sentiment that surrounds the monarch. Speaking to American friends and media this past week, I have found myself explaining that for us in Britain, the Queen or King is something like the living embodiment of the flag. Just as Americans swear allegiance to the flag, so in Britain our law-makers, soldiers and the rest of the citizenry swear their allegiance to the monarch. Imagine that the American flag walked among you and you get a feeling of what the monarch means to us, I explain.

But there is another corner of the bafflement that requires a slightly harsher response, and that is the republican critique of monarchy which has a problem with the institution because it somehow epitomises ‘unearned privilege’. It is a rather touching objection for Americans in particular to hold, because it suggests that theirs is a land in which unearned privilege is unheard of. Something is exposed here about America’s wrong-headed view of itself. But it also reveals something else about American politics, as well as our own.